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Brad Glasgow

16 Aug, 10 tweets, 4 min read

There's a new disturbance in gaming, as if Anita Sarkeesian herself were resurrected and turned into a formerly successful actor.

Her name: Geena Davis.

Geena Davis created the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media: (If she can see it, she can be it™).

And they kinda just sat out there doing Anita Sarkeesian type research, counting the number of women that are in media.

But now they've turned to the video game world and put out "an analysis of masculinity in video games and the gaming community."
seejane.org/wp-content/upl…

As you might imagine, I have issues. 🙂

I'm not going to do a deep, deep dive into the study because this is stuff we've all seen before. It's a content analysis. How many streamers are men. How many streamers play male protagonist games, blah blah.

One of the things it did was use a bot to comb through language on Twitch and report on language it considers problematic.

For example, 20% of the time, streamers use that horrible, ableist slur... "crazy."

The study carries with it the same argument that Anita Sarkeesian relies on: video games somehow reinforce toxic masculinity in the real world through stereotypes.

The major difference between this and Sarkeesian's work is that it does not try to hide its anti-violence agenda.

The study uses some form of the word "violence" 79 times.

One of the studies it cites lists Brad Bushman as one of the authors. Bushman has had a paper on violence in video games retracted and his co-author had her PhD revoked it was so bad.

So what's Geena Davis' agenda? Here it is.

Increase diversity in games. Gotcha.
More fat people in games. Yay fat dudes!
More old people in games. Even though they exclude anyone over 26 in their survey.
Revealing clothing is bad!
Avoid gratuitous violence in video games...

As I said, it's mostly Anita Sarkeesian, but more transparent in their agenda. And here's Anita Sarkeesian announcing that she's going to host a panel about it!

@BrendanSinclair

And, of course, games media like @BrendanSinclair are reporting uncritically about it.

Best not question these reports. That'll get people to thinkin'!

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More from @Brad_Glasgow

Brad Glasgow

@Brad_Glasgow

18 Nov 20

Remember last year when the Anti-Defamation League published that survey about gamer harassment? If you don't remember, they lied about it being nationally representative, and their survey claimed that 29% of gamers have been doxed.

They've published a 2020 survey.

If 29% of gamers have actually been doxed, then that would mean *millions* of gamers have had their private information posted. I asked them about that and didn't get much of an answer.

This year that 29% has somehow dropped down to 13%,.

Interestingly, while 68% of gamers have experienced "severe harassment", only 21% of respondents said that harassment made them feel uncomfortable.

Read 4 tweets

Brad Glasgow

@Brad_Glasgow

21 Jul 20

Jason Schreier, who has like 90% of Twitter blocked, has a new article up talking about the culture of sexism at Ubisoft.

Much of the conversation about that reporting now is focused on this part, which talks about Ubisoft's reluctance to feature a solely-female protagonist.

This is an intentional conflation: Ubisoft is sexist, therefore they are reluctant to feature only female protagonists.

This makes it impossible to have an intelligent discussion about whether or not it's a smart business move to have a male protagonist.

From this article it looks like there was a two-to-one ratio of people preferring to play the male over the female protagonist in Odyssey. forbes.com/sites/kevinmur…

Read 5 tweets

Brad Glasgow

@Brad_Glasgow

9 Apr 19

Megan Condis, who is still protected, participated in a softball interview on Vox, where she spouted more nonsense.

One of your primary duties as a journalist is to convey WHY what you are telling your audience is important. Here the writer says white nationalism in gaming is important because a game made a lot of money.

Of course Condis cites the ESA survey, which is not entirely accurate. But hey, she's a qualitative researcher, she doesn't care about data.

Read 6 tweets

Brad Glasgow

@Brad_Glasgow

20 Jan 19

The MAGA kids thing shows how important optics are, especially in the era of intersectionalism. To many, a MAGA hat is a symbol of evil. A smug white kid wearing a MAGA hat staring down an elderly Native American is an intersectionalist's simplistic dream of Good vs. Evil.

The kids did act in an unruly way. The tomahawk chop in particular was disrespectful. But we now have several videos of the incident, none of them corroborating the allegation that they were chanting Trumpisms.

The boys did not behave in an intimidating fashion. The videos show no evidence that anyone in that crowd had their movement impeded, or felt threatened in any way,, despite the claims coming from the Native elder's side afterward.

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